A variety of electronic devices nowadays are configured for outputting a video. Examples of such electronic devices include portable communication devices which may playback a video which is stored locally at the electronic device, a video which is generated by a computer instruction code stored locally at the electronic device, or a video which is retrieved over a wireless interface.
For enhanced control and user experience, a user interface may allow the user to navigate in the video along a time axis. The user interface may allow the user to skip forward or to rewind in the video by a time shift, for example. Various implementations of the user interface may be used for navigation in the video along the time axis. For illustration, a distance on an input interface or a distance detected by a gesture control input unit may be converted into a time shift by which the user skips forward or rewinds in the video or into a rate at which fast forward or fast backward operations are performed.
Such conventional approaches for controlling navigation in a video have certain shortcomings. For illustration, a user may be particularly interested in following the movement of a particular object in a video. Without any prior knowledge of the anticipated movement of the object in the video, the conventional approaches for navigation in the video may make it challenging to navigate in the video in a manner that is tailored to the movement of the specific object in which the user may be interested. For illustration, an input action in which the user slides along the display surface by a pre-defined distance, performs a gesture control which is recognized to have a pre-defined distance, or otherwise performs a navigation input action to navigate in the video, this navigation input action may cause the same skip in the video independently of whether the user is interested in tracking a slow object or a fast object in the video. Enhancing the control over navigation in videos would not only be of interest for improved user experience, but also aids the user in performing tasks such as tracking objects.